Lázaro Montes reached base in each of his first three plate appearances in the major leagues, and the third one left Fenway Park’s centre field at 106 miles an hour. The 21-year-old Havana-born outfielder debuted for the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday, 1 September 2026, went 2-for-4 with a walk, drove in two and scored two, and Seattle beat the Red Sox 9-6.
The home run came in the fifth, on a 1-2 count against reliever Wyatt Olds, and travelled a Statcast-projected 407 feet. It made Montes, at 21, one of only a handful of Mariners ever to homer in a debut — the seventh, by the club’s own count — and the first since Ichiro Suzuki in 2001 to collect multiple hits in his first game.
By Cuba Dugout’s tracking, it also made him the 30th Cuban-born player to appear in a major-league game in 2026, extending what was already the largest Cuban season in modern major-league history. The previous Opening Day record was 26; twenty-nine had appeared before Tuesday; seven were All-Stars.
The numbers that forced the move
Montes did not sneak up on anyone. He hit 38 home runs with 96 RBI and a .247/.365/.556 line (137 wRC+) between Double-A Arkansas and Triple-A Tacoma this season — only one player in the entire minor leagues hit more. The underlying data is louder than the counting stats: at Tacoma his hard-hit rate sat near 57 percent. He walks at a 14 percent clip and strikes out at 30 — the classic three-true-outcomes giant, arriving with the swing-and-miss risk priced in. He is 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, and he bats left-handed.
| Year | Levels | The line |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | DSL Mariners | Pro debut at 17, months after signing |
| 2023 | Complex League / Single-A Modesto | .303, 13 HR in 70 games |
| 2024 | Modesto / High-A Everett | 21 HR as a teenager (542 PA) |
| 2025 | Everett / Double-A Arkansas | 32 HR; Northwest League MVP |
| 2026 | Arkansas / Triple-A Tacoma | .247/.365/.556, 38 HR, 96 RBI, 137 wRC+ |
| 1 Sep 2026 | MLB debut, at Boston | 2-for-4, HR, 2 RBI, 2 R, BB |
Baseball America ranked him a top-100 prospect as far back as 2024; he sits at No. 56 on MLB Pipeline today and No. 5 in a stacked Seattle system.
From Guanabacoa to the top of the system
Montes was born in Havana on 22 October 2004, and grew up around Guanabacoa and Habana del Este, coming up through the capital’s youth tournaments — he hit .357 in the 11-12 age category. Power runs in the family: his father, Yosmel Montes, was a national-level hammer thrower in Cuban athletics who never got his shot abroad, and who later became his son’s strength-and-conditioning coach. “He materializes in me what he couldn’t accomplish as a hammer thrower,” Lázaro told CiberCuba in 2022. “Now it’s time to repay them.”
In May 2018, when Lázaro was 13, the family left for the Dominican Republic — legally, his father has said, but quietly, because a departing athlete’s family that announced itself risked not being allowed to leave. Three and a half years of academy work later, Seattle signed him in January 2022 for a reported $2.5 million, one of the headline bonuses of that international class.
The generation that never played a Serie Nacional
The Yordan Álvarez comparison follows Montes everywhere — Baseball America made it explicit — and the surface parallels are real: Cuban-born, left-handed, enormous, signed by a West Coast club out of the Dominican Republic. But Montes represents something newer. Yoelqui Céspedes and Luis Robert built Serie Nacional résumés before leaving; Montes left at 13 and never played a game in Cuba’s adult league. He is the first star of a generation whose entire development happened outside the island — youth tournaments in Havana, then straight to the academies of the Dominican Republic. The Cuban pipeline to MLB no longer runs through the Serie Nacional at all, and 2026’s record player count is partly the first harvest of that change.
Two debut home runs, and why only one of them changes the count
Montes was not the only player with Cuban roots to homer in his first major-league game on 1 September. Yohandy Morales did it for the Washington Nationals the same day, and Spanish-language coverage filed both men under the same heading. The distinction matters, and it is the sort of thing that gets lost: Morales was born in Miami in 2001, the son of the former Cuban national-team player Andy Morales. He is Cuban-American, not Cuban-born.
That is not a smaller story — a second-generation Cuban debuting with a home run on the same afternoon as a first-generation one is a neat piece of symmetry about where the pipeline has got to. But it is a different story, and it does not move the 2026 Cuban-born count, which is what the record is measured in. Montes is the 30th. Morales belongs on the roll of players with ties to Cuba, which is longer and grows for different reasons.
What to watch
The call-up settled a roster question early: Montes was Rule 5-eligible this winter, so the 40-man addition was coming regardless — Seattle simply chose to get a September look instead of waiting. With the Mariners fading, the final month is an audition for 2027. Watch how he handles right-handed breaking balls over a full month rather than one at-bat, and whether the 30 percent strikeout rate travels up a level. The first swing has already answered the only question nobody had.
Cuba Dugout tracks every Cuban player in the majors — start with our Cuban baseball hub, or see how the last great Cuban-born slugger’s path compares on our Cubans on the Astros page.
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